


Choosing the right place

by GodOfWar



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Spooky, liminal spaces, story telling, the matter of disappearing lake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 01:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20368468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfWar/pseuds/GodOfWar
Summary: Choosing the right place for vacation is hard.





	Choosing the right place

About decade ago I went vacationing with my folks. 

We went through a lot of pages, searching for good cheap place in specific region till I stumbled on the surprisingly good offer and my sister booked the place for two weeks. We've found this place no problem, road was good and straight and with no confusing marks scattered along, just a green 'yes, you are here' sign when we arrived. It stood somewhere on the left side of the road behind a blue low gate, among tall trees and sparse grass. 

The house was actually a bungalow made of three connected parts that looked nothing alike standing, a bit remote, at the very end of unevenly spaced row of crookedly made boxy houses. There was no 'view'. Windows went only on one side, facing something that looked like off- pink smallish prison. It had bars on the windows. Funny thing, we never figured out where the entrance was? I mean, it was maybe twenty meters from the small terrace we sat on in the mornings to eat and I don't think we ever went looking if the fourth wall - the one that was facing the forest - was the one with any kind of door? The bungalow inside was as mismatched as it was outside with three very different rooms, kitchen and bathroom. It was long. The largest room was cosy, with big bed and very large wardrobe and it had TV, so we would sit there until late most days- four adults, two toddlers, one teenager. The smallest room was where me and my niece slept. It had two beds so close together that we could have held hands if we wished. We didn't. It was the size of the cupboard. We had space of 20 cm between bedframe and door. 

Leaving shoes on the floor counted as clutter.

There was a mirror. 

Pretty normal square mirror facing the door. We turned it toward the wall the first night. The window was the size of notebook page. The only thing you could see through it was part of the tree and gray window with flaking off - pink paint. When you closed the door in the night it went so dark we were not able to see further then the tip of our noses. You could hear everything from there. Most of the time it was eerily quiet.

Not just inside.

Outside too.

We saw other people, of course. I can't for the life of me remember speaking with even one person. Supposedly thirty bungalows, all full, parking lot with maybe a two spaces left. Quiet. The whole place felt deserted. It was middle of the season, the beach was full of light sand, water was clean and warm...At any given time there were less then five people on it.

If you went by the road alongside the lake, you'd get to a little place build on the strangely high slope in a completely flat environment. I mean it. We walked a lot, the whole space was flat like a table, and then suddenly that thing looking like it grew out from nowhere, rough wood planks directly on the ground climbing up, and a food place, literally in the middle of nowhere. We bought french fries, hot-dog and salads brought by a lanky teenage boy huddled in enormous sweater when there was thirty Celsius outside. And even while the food was very good and not expensive at all, we didn't take that road again.

There was only one grocery shop. It stood on the other side of the main road, past the blue gate, smack in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by few acres of what looked like wheat and with a solid wall of forest behind it. We went there every day. I came home and couldn't remember who was selling me things. Not the gender. Not the face. They had industrial fridge that looked far too big for the kind of shop you could cross with three big steps.

You could count that at any given hour there would be three man on bicycles standing around and they would never say anything.They always had only one bottle of beer, but I never seen them drink from it.

I've seen the owner of those summer houses twice. He was old. I heard him speak only once and it was only 'key. Number 27' while he took it from the wall full of spare keys. We wondered where are numbers 28 - 30.

One day my brother in law borrowed a pedal boat. We went. Once. Never seen a lake so calm. Or with water this dark bluish hue without even one duck or swan in sight. I don't suppose that swinging ropes should swing so high from the trees, either. It was peaceful. We didn't come back. 

We left the holiday camp frequently. Cities around were small but bustling, old German bunkers- fascinating, a large natural forest few miles away - lovely and loud. My youngest niece just started to crawl. Her older cousin was four. She got sick and three people left the house. It rained that day, and I didn't sleep because I was alone it the room the size of cupboard. Floor was creaking like somebody walked back and forth. The roof was thumping and scratching and screaming and when I got up and went to the bathroom it was barely a quiet murmur there. We left before our fourteen days.

We decided to come back next year. It was cheap, it was quiet, it was smack in the middle from of all the places we wanted to see again and those we couldn’t the first time around..

Only...none of us could remember the name of the nearby village. Or the camp. Or the owner. Or the name of the lake. The phone number in my sister's phone was long gone, deleted months before. The recipe from the center lost and never found. Internet page, searched for hours with very narrow specifications unfound. My brother in law-our designated leading driver- for the life of him didn't remember the main road number, so we fallowed the map. And then retraced our little sightseeing ventures. Searched from those points inwards. There was no road. No camp. No lake in that place on the map.

All the pictures made got deleted when the card just refused to cooperate. The only few that survived the purge were generic, didn't show anything. Pictures of the forest. My niece in her walker. Me, playing with pink ball, dressed up in whole white with only a shrub and peak of glistening lake as background.

Who knows, maybe all this, right here, was a very valid reason why, while water close to beach was warm and clear, and food nice and cheap and sand soft under feet…there was nobody swimming

**Author's Note:**

> Never found that place again and Google Earth doesn't see it either.The closest lake to our gauged location is BIG. Nothing like that tiny tranquil thing.   
I needed to get back into writing mood, so I've decided to share...strangely enough I wrote it in half an hour at 3 am because it didn't want to leave after not thinking about if for years.   
Wishing you your own unexplained stories, bye!


End file.
